The Chavez World Tour

Jackson Diehl, writing in the Washington Post describes Hugo Chavez's tour around the world last week. As he points out, most people did not pay any attention to the words of the Venezuelan Castro understudy. I noted his appearance in Tehran, but did not post a whole lot about his other antics. It was a busy week after all.

No wonder Ahmadinejad had just described Chávez as a "brother and trench mate." But the Venezuelan wasn't finished. Israel's acts, he said, reminded him of a time when Simon Bolivar had invoked the story of Cain and Abel to talk about an enemy. "Bolivar said that day: 'God, if you have justice, throw a lightning bolt at the monsters,' " Chávez pronounced. "I would say today: 'God, throw the lightning bolts at the monsters.' Inshallah ."

According to BBC Monitoring, Chávez won a round of applause from his Iranian friends. Curiously, though, his tirade got almost no attention outside Tehran. In a week during which a movie star was pilloried for a somewhat milder anti-Semitic outburst (and Mel Gibson at least could say he was drunk), no one seemed to care about the hate speech of the president of a large South American country and one of the world's biggest oil exporters — a man who has been conducting a frenetic campaign to win his government a two-year term on the United Nations Security Council.

In fact, Chávez's performance was in keeping with the character of an eight-nation tour that took him from Argentina to Benin. But Israel was not his main concern. At each stop, the self-styled "Bolivarian revolutionary" delivered superheated denunciations of the United States and called for a global coalition to combat "the U.S. imperialist monster."

Diehl goes on to describe several of Hugo's greatest hits, so to speak. But a lot of his rhetoric produced the opposite of what he intended, it would seem. Hugged by some dictators, others wanted little to do with him. Russia just wanted access to Venezuelan cash, but Putin literally held him off when Chavez tried for a hug.

What to make of all this? One easy explanation is that Chávez has come unhinged, and his hatred of the United States — not to mention Jews — is pathological. But I find another theory more persuasive: Chávez is betting that resentment and anger toward the United States has become so entrenched around the world that by becoming its champion he can make himself a global leader. First, in his reckoning, Venezuela will brush aside Russia and France to lead the opposition to U.S. initiatives at the United Nations. Then, who knows?

This offers an interesting test of just how far other countries are now willing to go in challenging the U.S. global role. The answer is: not too far, if Chávez is the alternative. In Argentina, South American governments swiftly rejected his suggestion of a joint military force. In Belarus, he got a bear hug from Lukashenko, a diplomatic pariah; but Vietnam's top leaders, who are hoping to host President Bush in November, appeared embarrassed by Chávez's rhetoric, which they pointedly did not second.

Hugo is a very arrogant little man with a very big mouth. He is dangerous only in that he has elected to join hands with the Axis of Egos™ along with Ahmadinejad and Kim Jong Il. But he can, and is, stirring up trouble for the world. Diehl more or less dismisses him, I would not be so quick to do so.